Hi everyone!

I live in Per� and I�m working with a company that have eco lodges in the national reserve of Tambopata, Madre de Dios. It�s a pristine undisturbed place to see a loooot of wildlife, And filming wildlife full time is my gol. So I�m thinking about stook footage as an income and doing what I love.

I have a good relationship with the founder and owner of the lodges and we are evaluating a company option. He will finance equipment, flight tickets, etc; and I will put my time as camera man, editing the clips and upload them.

So this is great as you can see, but he as the investor want to know how the money will eventually return (we both know this is a long term project).
I�ve already made a cash flow but there is just one data missing to be more realistic. And that is: in one month, how many clips do you guys sell from the clips you have upload, and what was the income for that month? I could find in the web only the $income for the number of sold clips, but is missing the number of clips been uploaded in total and for that month. Knowing that number, I could estimate roughly the number of clips I need to make per month to see an income in the x year. Please notice this is for footage, not photos.

I know this is a valuable information and I would really appreciate it since this is an exception opportunity for me, please can you guys give me a hand with this?


Thanks in advance!

I think you drive the road backwards. Working full time on location means that
maybe it is better to make a pilot first and show to some networks.
As long as you have someone to finance you, you can produce a documentary series.
Split the work with an editor if you feel uncomfortable to do the larger scale post production.
You will have an one time good payment plus you can still sell content to stock that might sell might not.

It�s a pristine undisturbed place to see a loooot of wildlife

This truly sounds great!

Of course, what you're asking is the classic impossible-to-answer "how many clips do I need to make this?" question... It's fun to discuss, but in the end, numbers from other people will mean absolutely nothing. Someone with a 1,000 wildlife clips might sell 0 per month, and another with 50 good ones (as in USABLE) might sell 50.

Anyway, because I love wildlife, and it sounds like a great opportunity, I think you should do it, but I'm not making any promises regarding $$$...

Here are some of my recent stats, just for fun:

Pond5 Oct sales: 18.
Wildlife: 7.
Percentage of sales that were of wildlife: 39%.
Percentage of wildlife clips in my portfolio: around 25%.

Same stats for November: only 1 out of 18 sales was related to animals.

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At another site, 4 out of 24 sales in November were wildlife sales (16.7%), with a portfolio consisting of less than 15% wildlife.

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If you add in nature and landscapes, the numbers go WAY up of course, so I encourage you to not only use your telephoto lenses.

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Also keep in mind that a clip of a great white shark will probably sell 1,000+ times more than a viscacha...

Try to capture interesting behaviour, like hunting, fighting and mating, and the chances of selling go up 10-100 times.

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For the people wondering where wildlife shots are used outside of documentaries - lots of places! Anything related to the environment (or rather, the destruction of) always use wildlife shots, and there are a lot of those projects being produced every week.

Also, standard business/corporate videos use videos of powerful animals.

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This turned into a long post, so this is the end.

I wish you the best of luck!

Ok so first I want to thanks all of you for all your feedback!

Steve,
I checked your website, It�s very nice and you have very detail information, thanks for sharing that.

As if there are agencies that focus on wildlife videos, I know one called naturefootage.com, if someone else know any other ones please let me know.

I have seen a lot of wildlife documentaries using stock footage (you can see the agencies in the credits), even in big documentaries like planet earth. I don�t know if this is a wide or main market though, I hope it is.


George,
I�m open to all possibilities and I like your idea. I have never work with tv networks so I don�t really know how all that works, but I�m going to start to make some research. Can you recommend me any webpage, forum, etc were I can learn more about this?


Martha,
Wow! That�s a lot of experience you have in the business. Thanks for sharing your insights.

Thinking out loud� maybe it�s not a bad idea having money to buy new gear and travel. Since I�ll not invest money in these trips (the investment would be my time doing what I love), doing this as a part time �hobby� doesn�t sound bad at all.
Is good to know and to corroborate thanks to all of you that this is not probably a full time job. Is good to �hit land� to take good decisions. 

Increasingdifficulty,
Thanks a lot for your reply, and also for the fun part. I understand these numbers are very relative, but since you give some detailed numbers I�m again intrigue, in this case with your results in your particular situation.
So what I would like to ask you then is how many clips you have on your portfolio? And how many downloads you had the last month, lets say, for not only wildlife footage? I don�t want to be annoying though, so feel free to skip this if you prefer.

Also keep in mind that a clip of a great white shark will probably sell 1,000+ times more than a viscacha...

Try to capture interesting behaviour, like hunting, fighting and mating, and the chances of selling go up 10-100 times.

Totally agree, and this is what�s really drives me into this. I have a lot of opportunities to capture rarely documented behavior. I would like to give you two examples.

Last year there was an active Harpy eagle nest with one chick near the lodge, you could get great footage of the mom bringing prey to the nest and feeding the chick and, with some luck, get a shot of the Harpy hunting. I will also have access to a moving platform, so logistics isn�t actually a problem. (I�m now waiting for the next year hopping they breed again). Here is a playlist where you can see this, although it was done with security and trap cams for scientific proposes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fiWBMDKjt0&list=PLbI535UFO9JyFomD1JNdf9zeo3omc-gP6 [nofollow]

Another example is that this area is probably the second place in the world where you have most opportunities to see jaguars, been the Pantanal in Brasil the first. You can get great shots from the boat but using a blind in land is totally possible for better results.

And these examples brings me to another point. The filming crew doing documentaries for big TV networks usually don�t live near this places and have to invest good money to have their crew for a few weeks on location. Were I, since I live here, can stay for a long period of time all year round, having more opportunities to get those nice rare shots.

This post have gone to long hehe sorry, but I wanted to give you guys a better understanding so new ideas can come up. Maybe contact BBC directly, for example, is not a bad idea if I got those shots (the equipment meets their requirements at least).

What do you guys thing?

Best

Daniel

George,
I�m open to all possibilities and I like your idea. I have never work with tv networks so I don�t really know how all that works, but I�m going to start to make some research. Can you recommend me any webpage, forum, etc were I can learn more about this?

You don't need forums you need contacts I think. You can expand later. Many people lost their way ending up chasing festival awards or exposure.
Guess a way is to direct contact channels or sites and communicate your idea and benefits of you doing this to as many as you can.
Listen to their opinion or suggestions and decide yourself.

Back to stock, I have a question David, have your searched in general the terms and locations that you will shoot?
I mean if park views are covered by aerial & drone shots in main agencies, or the species that live there "exist" in large amounts as stock content already?

Here is a subjective cynical opinion, doing what you love as main job, sometimes becomes a trouble if you base your meal on it.
The "easy" way to test the waters is to do some filmimg and edit some promos for the resort you currently work and ask opinions.
I wish you best of luck!

I am not the right one to judge a video but I like it
If there is no actual material online, sounds as an actual opportunity!

mmm� So that�s $4-5K per month? That would be assuming that you resell your 1000 clips every month, but I feel I�m assuming wrong. Can you clarify this for me?

Well, I said LESS than 1,000 clips so not quite that much.

But the average $4-5 per clip per month is just that - the average, which means some clips may earn $0, and others $100.

To me, this is the most useful metric when comparing, and whatever costs you may have is up to you to add. For someone living in NYC, a clip worth $10k might cost a short walk, while it would be a lot more expensive for someone living in Zadar.

You should know that the $4-5/clip/month is a HIGH number, and most people don't make nearly that much. And you probably won't either the first 1-2 years.

That is because I:

� Don't upload a thousand similars, only 1-3 of the best clips of a subject/location.
� Spend A LOT of time on the metadata - which should be different for each site. You HAVE to know and use each search engine to your advantage.
� Have some unique clips that generally can't be filmed - they are "Photoshopped" (but in After Effects).
� Have CONTROL over my clips - do not go exclusive or use services like BlackBox if you want to maximize earnings.

Most people are very lazy when it comes to the "boring" side of stock, which is the metadata, SEO, editing, adapting to new markets, etc., anything except for actually filming. That means they probably lose thousands of dollars.

Some people just upload directly from their memory cards, write a few lazy descriptions (often very bad) that they copy/paste to 30 clips, upload 50 slightly different variations of the same clip and then complain when they have 5 sales from 20,000 clips...

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Also, if you really want to sell a lot of clips, you need subjects that are likely to sell over and over, and over, and over again. If you only have very specific clips, of an animal few normal people even know exists, you will probably only see 1-2 lifetime sales. On the other hand, a roaring lion is universally known and needed all the time.

This is also connected to tagging. If you have a clip of an alpaca that people only find if they specifically search for "alpaca", you might see a few sales. But if people also find that clip when they search for "travel in South America", you will sell a lot more.